Singers soar in iffy ‘Hansel and Gretel’

Any opera company that sets itself the task of mounting Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” faces formidable challenges. Its music is technically demanding. The orchestra players need skill and stamina (and, for an ensemble that does not play together on a regular basis, extra rehearsals that are hard to squeeze into a small company’s budget). In addition to high-caliber musicianship, it needs stage direction that finds an always-shifting line between fantasy and reality, and honors them both. Finally, its scenic elements – costumes, settings and lighting – need not be elaborate, but they must be imaginative, and utterly believable in the way our dreams are.

Lyric Opera San Diego took up these challenges on Friday night in the first of five performances (through next Saturday) in the red-and-gold candy box setting of its home, the Birch North Park Theatre. Its success in meeting them was uneven.

A disciple of Richard Wagner, Humperdinck expanded what was originally a set of songs meant for holiday performance at home into an extended music-drama that was an instant popular success. No less a legend than Richard Strauss conducted the 1893 premiere, and Gustav Mahler led the first Vienna performance not long afterward. Sung in the same English translation that was heard on Friday, it was the first opera heard over radio in its entirety, from the stage of London’s Royal Opera, and the first Saturday afternoon matinee broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera.

Conductor Kelly Kuo drew promising sound from the orchestra in the opera’s short prelude, but rhythmic insecurity and patchy playing soon gave evidence of too little rehearsal time, collectively and individually. Kuo’s attempts to make the opera soar were sporadically successful, but in the end the resources at his disposal mandated a cautious performance rather than an exciting one.

The unseen musical hero of the evening was Janie Prim, credited in the program for music preparation. In the world’s opera houses, from Vienna to Des Moines, Prim and her colleagues drill notes and rhythms into soloists and choristers, and the results make all the difference in the world. From start to finish on Friday evening, the high quality of her work was evident in both principals and supporting singers.

In the title roles, soprano Kate Oberjat (Gretel) and mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn (Hansel) managed to carve real personalities out of fairy-tale stereotypes, even when they had to find something to do on a bare stage during long stretches where stage director J. Sherwood Montgomery gave them little to do.

Under Chinn’s reined-in boyishness, a big luscious voice lurks, and San Diego audiences should hear her in roles that let it loose. Oberjat’s silvery soprano is especially suited to this role, as girlishly fresh at the end of this long vocal workout as it was at the beginning.

Scott Gregory (Father) took honors as the most committed performer, physically and vocally. If his big voice is a bit unruly from time to time and lacks an ideal evenness in its range, his wholehearted immersion in the story and the character more than made up for it.